Today's Scripture Reading (March 19, 2021): 2 Corinthians 1
Psalm 46 is sometimes referred to
as “The Shakespeare Psalm.” If you haven’t heard it, the story is that in 1610
the translators of the King James Version of the Bible, which was first
published in 1611, wanted to do something to honor the playwright. William
Shakespeare was born on April 23, 1564, which made him forty-six years old in
1610. So, in honor of the dramatist,
they decided to place a hidden message in Psalm 46. They chose to put his name
in the Psalm in the form of a code. Using the King James translation, if you
count forty-six words from the beginning of Psalm 46, you will find the word
“shake.” If you count forty-six words from the end of the Psalm, not counting
the word “Selah,” which is more of a punctuation mark, you will find the word
“spear.” If you are reading a King James Bible that retains the ancient
spelling, the word is actually rendered as “speare.” Thus, you have discovered a
message that the translators have hidden in the pages of the King James Bible
to honor the Elizabethan playwright, his name “shake speare.”
Is the story true? Maybe, but it doesn’t
seem likely that the translators of the Bible would have been that distracted
by a local author's birthday. Shakespeare’s fame actually increased after his
death in 1616. Today, some scholars question whether William Shakespeare was
even a real person, arguing that the plays we have attributed to him were
actually written by a community of authors who are now long forgotten. Yet, the
myth of Psalm 46 continues.
The basic scheme of reading Psalm
46 to find the hidden message, in this case, an acknowledgment of William
Shakespeare, is the same scheme that lies behind our quest to unlock the “Bible
code.” Believers in a “Bible code” argue that the gospel writers, or the Holy
Spirit, organized the biblical writings so that a prophetic message is revealed
when you read the passage by skipping a certain number of words. Like Psalm 46,
maybe you read every fifty words or every five words. Or perhaps it is a mathematical
progression where you read ten words and then eleven, twelve, thirteen, and so
on, to get the message. Another method is to place the letter in a grid of
maybe fifty squares, with the spaces removed, and then examine the diagonal or
vertical columns to find the hidden messages, similar to doing a “word search”
puzzle.
Sometimes, this process is
completed using the original Hebrew or Greek of the text. This process is often
done using the King James Version of the Bible, making the outcome even more remarkable
because Elizabethan English was not the language in which the original
documents were written. The advancement in computers has made this search for
messages even more lucrative, and if you want to look, skipping letters, you
can find even find the names of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris hidden in the pages
of the Bible.
Are these messages real? Personally,
I don’t think so, especially when we begin to look for prophetic messages in
the English Version of the Bible. Similar statements can be found in the pages
of a Lee Child or Tom Clancy novel if you really want to look for them.
But beyond that, Paul states that
those messages are not there. Writing to the Corinthians, he confronts the concept
behind a Bible code. Apparently, some of the Corinthians were looking for
hidden messages in Paul’s letters and the documents they had received from
others. But Paul refutes that idea. Nothing is written in his letters that they
have to struggle to find. And no one else is busy hiding messages, either. What
he means is precisely what it is that he has written down. Paul and his
compatriots have not written anything that you cannot read and understand, just
by reading the letter.
Hidden messages? Sorry, according
to Paul, they are just not there.
Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: 2 Corinthians 2 & 3
No comments:
Post a Comment